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ZEROtherm BTF90 CPU Cooler

Introduction:

So you want to build a new gaming PC do you? There are lots of things to take into consideration before you start picking out the pieces that you want to put in it.

There are many different segments of a computer system. Each part of the system can make or break the optimal results that you may be looking for. One such segment is the cooling that will be used on your CPU. Whether you plan on overclocking your CPU or not also makes a huge difference as to which cooling hardware you will use.

For this review I will be looking at an air CPU cooler. This cooler was made by a company by the name of APACK. It is the ZEROtherm BTF90 CPU cooler to be exact.

There are a number of companies making CPU coolers these days and APACK seems to be a very aggressive one at this time. The company is only eight years old and already has some big name clients on board such as Samsung, Dell and LG. It was founded by three engineers and has expanded to be staffed by a number of top engineers. It has backing from Intel Capitol, and currently is trying to become one of the top players in the market to provide thermal solutions for cooling devices. APACK is located in Daejeon, Korea, which has its own form of California’s Silicon Valley.

ZEROtherm’s goal is to provide a solution to cool your CPU as efficiently as possible while still keeping the noise levels as low as possible. Hence, the “ZERO” part of the name.

Closer Look:

The box I received was slightly damaged in shipping because the shipping box was almost the same width as the product box and I had concerns for the product inside. As it turns out, all was fine with the product itself. The product box was very elaborately decorated. It has a window in the front through which you can see the cooler.

On the left side, there are several pictures of the product with descriptions of the individual parts of the cooler.

The right side of the box contains a chart with the specifications of the cooler.

Last, but not least, the rear of the box has not only the window in it, but also a graph showing the performance of the BTF90 and other coolers for reference.

Upon opening the box, the first thing you see is a small box. Underneath it is a plastic container which houses the CPU cooler.

Once everything that comes with the package is laid out, this is what you get: there are brackets that will allow this cooler to be installed on socket 775, 939, 949, AMD K8 and AM2 systems. Also included is an instruction manual in multiple languages and a performance thermal grease.

Now, let's take a better look at the cooler itself. If you haven’t already noticed, the top-down view of the cooler is shaped like a butterfly. The butterfly shape actually has a significant meaning. The shape represents ZEROtherm’s “first flight” of making a product for the retail market.

This cooler is using heatpipe technology to draw the heat from your CPU and expel it into the air. There are a total of eight pipes doing the heat drawing. That is actually quite a lot considering the size of this cooler. The pipes are connected to an array of copper fins that absorb the heat from the pipes. These fins represent more than 4,000 cubic centimeters of surface area. Blowing air across these fins to remove the heat into the air is a PWM speed controlled fan with a variable speed that covers the 750 to 2500 RPM range. There are also two bright red LEDs in the fan. The base of the cooler is polished copper to enhance contact with the CPU.